Aghast, the boy watches the animal leave, the hunch of its back, the workings of its haunches, trying to keep up with its master. He swipes at his face, at his eyes, his head feeling bare and empty, wishing that he might bring the moment back, that he could have somehow persuaded the man to let him keep it. The monkey belonged to him: surely anyone could see that?
What the boy doesn’t know—can’t know—was that the monkey leaves part of itself behind. In the scuffle, it has shed three of its fleas.
One of these fleas falls, unseen, to the ground, where the boy will unwittingly crush it with the sole of his foot. The second stays for a while in the sandy hair of the boy, making its way to the front of his crown. When he is paying for a flagon of the local brew in the tavern, it will make a leap—an agile, arching spring—from his forehead to the shoulder of the innkeeper.
The third of the monkey’s fleas will remain where it fell, in the fold of the red cloth tied around the boy’s neck, given to him by his sweetheart at home.
Later, when the boy has returned to the ship for the night, having eaten a dinner of some of the spiced nuts and a curious patty of bread, shaped like a pancake, he will pick up his favourite of the ship’s cats, an animal mostly white but with a striped tail, and nuzzle it against his neck. The flea, alert to the presence of a new host, will transfer itself from the boy’s neckerchief, to the thick, milk-white fur of the cat’s neck.
This cat, feeling unwell, and with the feline’s unerring eye for those who dislike it, will take up residence, the next day, in the hammock of the midshipman. When he, that night, comes to his hammock, he will curse at the now-dead animal he finds there, turn it unceremoniously out, kicking it across the room.
Four or five fleas, one of which once belonged to the monkey, will remain where the cat lay. The monkey’s flea is a clever one, intent on its survival and success in the world. It makes its way, by springing and leaping, to the fecund and damp armpit of the sleeping, snoring midshipman, there to gorge itself on rich, alcohol-laced sailor blood.
Three days out, past Damascus and heading for Aleppo, the quartermaster enters the captain’s cabin to report that the midshipman is unwell and confined below. The captain nods, still examining his charts and sextant, and thinks nothing more of it.
The next day, he receives word, as he stands on the upper deck, that the midshipman is raving, foaming at the mouth, his head quite pushed sideways by a tumour in his neck. The captain frowns as the quartermaster speaks these words into his ear, then gives orders for the ship’s physician to visit the man. Oh, the quartermaster then adds, and several of the ship’s cats seem to have expired.
The captain turns his face to regard the quartermaster. The expression on his face is one of distaste, bafflement. Cats, you say? The quartermaster nods, respectfully, eyes cast down. How very peculiar.
The captain thinks for a moment longer, then flicks his fingers towards the sea. Throw ’em overboard.
The deceased cats, three in all, are taken by their striped tails and flung into the Mediterranean. The cabin boy watches, from a hatch in the deck, wiping his eyes with his red scarf.
Shortly afterwards, they dock at Aleppo, where they offload more of the cloves and a portion of the coffee and several score rats, which make a dash for the shore. The ship’s physician knocks on the door of the captain’s cabin, where he is conferring about weather and sails with his second officer.
“Ah,” says the captain, “how is the man…the, well, midshipman?”
The physician scratches under his wig and smothers a belch. “Dead, sir.”
The captain frowns, surveying the man, taking in his crooked wig, the potent smell of rum off him. “By what cause?”
The physician, a man more suited to setting bones and extracting teeth, looks up, as if the answer might be found on the low, planked ceiling of the cabin. “A fever, sir,” he says, with a drunkard’s decisiveness.
“A fever?”
“An Afric fever would be,” the physician slurs, “my opinion. He’s turned all black, you see, in patches, around the limbs and also in other places I will refrain from mentioning here, in this salubrious place, and so it is necessary for me to conclude that he must have taken ill and—”
“I see.” The captain cuts him off by turning away from him, towards his charts, the matter dealt with, as far as he is concerned.
The second officer clears his throat. “We shall, sir,” he says, “arrange a sea burial.”
The midshipman is wrapped in a sheet and brought up on deck. The sailors nearby cover their noses and mouths with cloth: the corpse is excessively odorous. The captain gives a short reading from the Bible; he, too, is struggling with the dead man’s smell, despite twenty-five years at sea and more watery funerals than he can recall.
“In the name of the Father,” the captain enunciates, raising his voice above the sounds of discreet retching at the back, “the Son and the Holy Ghost we commend this body unto the waves.
“You,” he gestures at the two sailors nearest him, “take the…do the…ah…yes…overboard.”
They dart forward and, with green faces, lift the corpse up and over the side.
The choppy, pleated surface of the Mediterranean folds over the body of the midshipman.
By the time they reach Constantinople, with an order to collect a consignment of furs from the north, the cats are all dead and the rat population is becoming a problem. They are eating through the crates and getting at the dried-meat rations, the second officer tells the captain. There were fifteen or sixteen of them in the cook’s quarters this morning. The men are demoralised, he says, keeping his eyes on the line of horizon out of the window, and several more have fallen ill overnight.
Two more men die, then a third, and a fourth. All with the same Afric fever that swells the neck and turns the skin red and blistered and black in places. The captain is forced to make an unscheduled stop in Ragusa, to take on more sailors, for whom he has no references or recommendations, which is the kind of hasty, slipshod seamanship he likes to avoid.
These new sailors are shifty-eyed, snaggle-toothed; they keep to themselves and speak very little, and only in some kind of Polack language. The Manx crew distrusts them on sight and will not communicate with them, or willingly share quarters.
The Polacks, however, are skilled at killing rats. They approach it as a sport, baiting a string with food, then lying in wait with an enormous shovel. When the creature appears—sleek, with drooping belly, gorged as it is on the sailors’ rations—the Polacks leap on it, shouting, singing, and beat it to death, rat brains and entrails sprayed on the walls and ceilings. They then cut off the tails and string them to their belts, passing around a clear liquid in a bottle, from which they all drink.
Turns your stomach, one of the Manx sailors says to the cabin boy, watching from across the cabin. Doesn’t it? Then he swats at his neck, his shoulder; the place is overrun with fleas. Damned rats, he growls to himself and turns over in his hammock.
At Venice, they don’t plan to dock for long—the captain is keen to get his cargo back to England, to recoup his fee, to get this hellish voyage over with—but while the unloading and loading take place, he gives an order to the cabin boy to find some cats for the ship. The cabin boy leaps eagerly down to the dockside; he is more than keen to leave the ship, its cramped, low ceilings and stink of rat and fever and death. Today two more men are confined to their quarters with fever, one a Manxman, like himself, the other one of the Polacks, his rat-tail adorned belt hung up beside him.
The boy has been in Venice once before, on his first voyage, and it is as he remembers it: a strange, hybrid place, half of sea, half of land, where the steps of houses are lapped by jade-green waters, and windows are lit by the guttering flares of candles, where there are no streets but narrow alleyways, leading off each other in a dizzying labyrinth, and arch-backed bridges. A place where you might very easily lose your way among the fog and the angled squares and the high buildings and tolling church bells.